Temperatur-Gradienten-Chromatographie Teil 1: Reversions-Gas-Chromatographie

Using the column wall itself as resistive heater for fast temperature gradients in liquid chromatography

A new system is proposed for applying fast temperature gradients in liquid chromatography. It consists of a 0.7 mm × 150 mm fused-silica column coated with a 50 μm Nickel-layer, which is connecting with a power source and a temperature control system to perform fast and reproducible temperature gradients using the column wall itself as a resistive heater. Applying a current of 4A and passive cooling results in a maximal heating and cooling rate of, respectively, 71 and -21 °C/min. Multi-segment temperature gradients were superimposed on mobile phase gradients to enhance the selectivity for three sets of mixtures (pharmaceutical compounds, a highly complex mixture and an insecticide sample). This resulted in a higher peak count or better selectivities for the various mixtures.

Axial thermal gradients in microchip gas chromatography

Fabrication technologies for microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) allow miniaturization of conventional benchtop gas chromatography (GC) to portable, palm-sized microfabricated GC (μGC) devices, which are suitable for on-site chemical analysis and remote sensing. The separation performance of μGC systems, however, has not been on par with conventional GC. Column efficiency, peak symmetry and resolution are often compromised by column defects and non-ideal injections. The relatively low performance of μGC devices has impeded their further commercialization and broader application. In this work, the separation performance of μGC columns was improved by incorporating thermal gradient gas chromatography (TGGC). The analysis time was ∼20% shorter for TGGC separations compared to conventional temperature-programmed GC (TPGC) when a wide sample band was introduced into the column. Up to 50% reduction in peak tailing was observed for polar analytes, which improved their resolution. The signal-to-noise ratios (S/N) of late-eluting peaks were increased by 3-4 fold. The unique focusing effect of TGGC overcomes many of the previous shortcomings inherent in μGC analyses.